In late August, 1941, the Buffalo Evening News printed a small item naming eight young men from western New York State who would be joining the U.S. Army Air Corps as flying cadets.

This notice might not have appeared had it not been that one of the young men was the son of Buffalo, New York's District Attorney.

One of the eight youths was Martin Andrews who lived in Hamburg, a suburb of Buffalo. All eight of the volunteers duly enlisted on September 2, 1941, and departed by train that evening for Maxwell Field in Montgomery, Alabama, headquarters of the Southeast Air Corps Training Center.